Quincunx

(Written in the style of The Guardian's "Digested Reads") I wrote a novel about love. Then my dead teacher said, "The best novelists observed human nature, so delete the narcissism, you self-absorbed twit." Only if I get to keep the prologue and the afterword. * A group of twentyboppers dressed as Japanese cartoon heroines—short skirts, glitter, two balloons strapped in front—compared the freedoms of lesbianism. “It’s like loving myself except I get to complain about the flaws in everyone else instead of fixing my own!” gushed Sailor Superficial. “That sounds marvelous!” enthused a greasy man with a video game heroine on his T-shirt. “Oh, you can’t do it. You’re male.” “Not a problem,” he said, and took estrogen pills. * Man lived in a little fort built out of pizza boxes and wrote that he was unique. When he came out for his monthly jaunt to the mall’s computer store, woman ambushed him in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood. “SO lonely!” she cried. “And unique,” she added in afterthought. Man still didn’t get it, so she flashed him. She’d written “Do me, you idiot” across her breasts in black Sharpie marker, finest point. “Ruined my best inker,” she screamed later, “for a social parasite who lives in a sty!” * Two hundred words. Can I pleeeeeease write about myself now? There’s only so much human nature to be found in blogs and the people who love them. No? Bugger off, then, you zombie. Hmm, people I couldn’t find in blogs, let me think. . . * Two post-menopausals clucking over sugar-filled pastries: “You can have my husband, you’ll return him before dinnertime.” “Back when the children were babies and I loved them more than him, he saw me nursing them and ran off. I hauled him back and damned if I know why.” “Less effort than breaking in a new one.” “Children have too much energy these days. Keep trying to break in new ones.” “Babies take that right out of you, don’t they?” “They do.” * My turn now. I don’t love babies. I hate babies. Babies don’t have hate but they could in the future and they have caused such pain in the past. I’d rather love a man, who already has a past and future, for what he presently is, but that kind of love makes babies and I hate babies. Mother love? What’s that? Reason and Science say it’s based on hormones. So is love. I hate it. Digest of the digest: Eyes wide shut [EDIT: First draft contained obscenity. So do many of the Guardian digests.]

Let's not forget that Jason and Hercules were both on their way to marry a different woman. Deianira avoided hurting the innocent bystander and put "love potion" (blood blighted by a centaur's dying curse. . .and lie) on the cloak of Hercules. Medea wanted to make Jason suffer, and made sure he was left alive to suffer longer, so she roasted his new bride and killed their sons in front of him ("I changed my mind. You're not worth breeding.").

I took the apples to be only apples, a metaphor for the boys, and Sarah May to be delusional or visual--the boys/men/boys are dead but she needed something around the house. (As I just remarked to Wyvern on IRC, someday we'll agree on an analysis--to which he wisely replied, "fat chance!") There's the slightest flash of inconsisent phrase with ". . .think[sic] that was echoed by Chris’s fall." Move Chris's fall into active tense and that'll clear up immediately. Anything else which could change, a proofreader can fix. Poke me if you want me to proofread.

I'm confused; both by punctuation and incomplete last paragraph, it looks like there was more to this story which didn't make it into the post.

Some of the people who brought Werewolf to our boards never became members. Heck, Jammeez even _hosted_ as an Honored Guest. This promises to be an interesting game, a pack of driven, scheming individuals and one moron. I'm schemed out from WW XXI, let me just drag Fortunata along behind someone else's scheme. . .

Tzimfemme dithered between the suits and canoes for awhile, but finally selected a boat, then trotted back to the booth for supplies. The carnie had his elbows on the counter and his chin in his hand. He eyeballed the naked mage. "Lady, you are going to burn," he remarked, and tossed a bottle of sunscreen onto the counter. Tzimfemme, already making practice casts with one of the shorter fishing poles, harrumphed and tuned out the rest of his chatter. She left her deposit and loaded the pole, bucket o' bait, and mesh bag into her royal blue canoe, then looked at the lake shore, back at the canoe, out at the lake shore. . . .With the canoe barely afloat, and standing knee-high in water on one side of the canoe, she flung her leg over it and at the far side of the boat, and successfully tumbled into the canoe. The naked mage unclipped the paddle and pushed the canoe further away from shore. Sunscreen be damned, the glitter of sun showed minuscule waves that Tzimfemme had never seen on the lake before, and they were a sight worth frying for. They did burn her retinas though, so she turned her eyes towards the far shore, where half-fallen tree trunks leaned out over the lake and forest undergrowth spilled over eroding banks. The other edges of the lake were like the first, gentle slopes edged by sand and cat-tail reeds; the far bank was a curiosity, and Tzimfemme dipped her paddle deep and kept splashing to a minimum as she approached it, aided by the breeze. She brought her paddle horizontal and pushed against the high bank, letting momentum turn the canoe perpendicular to the paddle, and looked out over the lake again. From here, the other banks spread like an ampitheater, and the naked mage pictured the lake in wetter eras, deeper then gradually draining, all the while with that light breeze pushing imperceptible waves against the hill which had formed the lake. In the shadow of the bank, Tzimfemme could look down into the water, although not to the bottom of the lake. She shipped her oar and watched the sediment for awhile, which twirled away from the bank contrary to the waves above, until a dull, wide-bodied fish jolted her memory. The naked mage threaded a worm onto the hook, half impaled on the short end of the curve and half wriggling free, then dropped the line straight down into the water and stopped when the sinker was no longer visible. While waiting, she studied the high bank; rocks studded the bank for a short distance above the water, and roots of forest undergrowth tangled along the upper edge, but the majority of the bank was good dark soil, maybe the remains of centuries of dead plants-- The line spun out with such force, the canoe started to twirl! Tzimfemme held her palm out flat near the whirling handle and took several blows, but slowed down the reel enough to grasp the handle. Immediately the handle bit into her bruised palm, but Tzimfemme flattened the pole while leaning against the pull, and the canoe halted at an angle to the bank, the fishing line lying across the port side parallel to the bank. She cranked slowly, and caught herself trying to rotate the pole-holding hand in tandem with the handle-cranking hand. The line cut a narrow zig-zag; the fish stayed in the shadow of the high bank and fought only to swim away in a straight line. All at once, the line went slack, and the naked mage began to wind with a gloomy look, but then the pole's tip bowed down to the water--the fish had swum under the canoe! She poked the pole into the water, deeper than the canoe, and continued to crank, feeling foolish, but the pole shook more and more, and the reel was almost full. Tzimfemme levered the pole out of the water and found a dull brown, plump, rounded fish wriggling on the hook. She dropped it into the mesh bag, secured the drawstring, and hung the bag in the water from the side of the canoe as she paddled back to the launching site. "Carp, three kilos," announced the carnie, and unhooked the bag from the hanging scale. "Still alive, also, very fresh. Nice work, lady." He dumped it out on the counter next to the buckets o' bait, where it lay on its side and flopped its tail, gills flaring. "I'll clean it for you if you forfeit the deposit," he added. Tzimfemme glanced over at Rydia's table and nodded. The carnie unfolded a short-bladed pocketknife, and before the naked mage had time to blink, the carp's guts and head were in an empty bait bucket and its fins and tail had been flipped into the lake. She watched carp juices soak into the wood while he unfolded a different tool and shucked scales off of the fish. "Faster it's cooked, the better it'll taste," concluded the carnie, handing the carp back to Tzimfemme, who held it uncertainly with both hands, then turned and walked over to Rydia's table.

Fortunata of House Tarquin All good things must come to an end. House Tarquin began as kings* but their prestige and skill had dwindled over the centuries; in these debased times, fourteen brats sprawled out over the youngest generation with brains enough for only three. If Fortunata, the oldest among them, had the looks of a goddess, it was a goddess of farmhands and hayricks. Her hair was hay-colored and tied up in fat horns on either side of her head, with a little cloth draped over the tops and trailing down to her back. Her laugh made roosters crow, she laughed at privy jokes and pratfalls, and she never knew when to laugh when most of the court tittered during a speech. She played badminton** obsessively on the palace grounds, holding her skirt up with one hand and the racquet in the air with the other as she minced across the court, lush body jiggling like a building in an earthquake, with half a dozen of her stubby-legged lapdogs running after her. Many court members have scryed her secretly, suspecting a ruse. There was none. Fortunata was truly empty-headed. As the intelligence of House Tarquin sank, its humanity awakened again. For all her faults, Fortunata is a very kind person. Five minutes of conversation about someone's woes is enough to make her declare eternal and undying compassion, and horrible wrath for whoever brought the woes upon her new ally. Another five minutes of conversation from the horrible enemy makes her forget the first oath and swear undying and eternal compassion to her new ally. Various allies have tried to teach her to shapeshift but the only use she found for it was twinning and annoying the stuffing out of cousin Malvolio, an effete little sausage of a man who regularly captured the hearts of every fourteen-year-old girl in the court and lost them at sixteen. *Consider that my druidess Tanaquil eventually married into the family. She was a knife-edged lady. **"Why badminton?" asked a courtier one day. Fortunata's eyes bulged out and she clapped a hand over her mouth that didn't hide all of her smile, then beckoned the courtier close with her other hand. "Shuttlecock!" she screeched, "Ha ha hee hee hee!" [EDIT: Altered to suit the extended Tarquin history.]

What are the naming conventions of the Chaos nobles? Give us a few examples, or at least let us know the form: single name, Given Name of Clan X, Clan Givenname?

Rydia unfolded a small hibachi and set its legs into sand at the lake shore, a respectable but visible distance away from the rental booth. After setting up a card table and clipping a quilted table-cover to its top, she hammered a pre-lettered wooden sign into the sand: Paying 5 gold per earlength of fish! Buffet later - one shiny per plate! She turned to the first picnic basket and unloaded melamine plates and mugs onto part of the table, piled plain steel flatware nearby, then removed a heat-resistant glass serving dish from the bottom of the basket. From the other basket she unpacked spatulas, knives, and sealed boxes and jars of spices and condiments before uncovering a flat cast-iron pan that went promptly onto the hibachi.

Irwin wasn't going to be pleased when he found out about the rosebushes. Sure, he wouldn't object to them growing except that the Vault codex didn't list them, but once he realized she had to get that soil from somewhere. . . .Billie Jo looked glum. Laborers had enough versatility that they could be fired. What was next? Kitchen apprenticeship?

A rare revision, revised bits in italics although the complete poem will have none. Pearl between the rocks and surf they quiver Scallop shells that sway on end, obedient to whims of water Not shut, though they will all pretend to be, strained through and thinking of her. there are a million grains of sand Streaming past into the bay becoming grit that makes the water Scar the shells which wait and pray that there's a way this world is kinder. but what of sand that's swept inside Sheltering within the shell that's hid away from whispers, water Clamors outside like a bell yet does not wake the grain; it's calmer. she settles down to rest in velvet Nacreous and softly breathing and from demands of soulless water She is safe, shell's love receiving, glowing, lets the shell transform her.

Us Why aren't we content with what we have? Why do we humans stew? Keep a sprig of hell in your pocket and hell won't come to you.

The dark dissolved and showed me what I fear, All joined as one, and rotting as it flies; Despite what godly say, I see you here. I saw too late the teeming dark was near. And knowing this, which nobody will prize, The dark dissolved and showed me what I fear Above the rest remains abstract, unclear. Despite what those in white will idolize, Despite what godly say, I see you here, Ten thousand winking every time you sneer, And when, by what you've done, another dies. The dark dissolved and showed me what I fear Is true; I died in some forgotten year. They prayed but what they want's not realized. Despite what godly say, I see you here. I pray that something less true will appear; I hope that here is kinder than your eyes. The dark dissolved and showed me what I fear; Despite what godly say, I see you here.

Actually, the guys in white coats are only for the promotion to Bard, when they do HORRIBLE, EVIL, UNSPEAKABLE things. . .

When lunchtime came, Billie Jo went back to her locker before remembering no one had pre-made lunches that day. She joined the few others in the dining room, mostly a cluster of privileged rich, but kept her distance and filled her plate with fruit salad and a cup of bean soup--meat was for the privileged rich, not for the buffet. "Cook," she remarked, leaning across the closed tureen, "why're all those people still here?" "Most of the laborers cleared out before they got here!" Cook retorted. Billie Jo sighed. "They tried to get special meals alright, but no, I said, buffet for everyone if you are all going to be dropping in all day! Kyraine's grandkids took a plate out to her, and I'll like to see her come in and blame me for that one," Cook waggled the ladle and spattered the table with bean soup, "not that she seems to be making much progress with whatever she's doing in that lab." She flung the ladle onto a spoon-rest and began wiping up the droplets. Billie Jo looked across the room and saw the man John had spoken about. He was standing in the middle of a knot of privileged people, nodding and chattering--"Yes, Melinda, reprehensible"--but his eyes were distant. The youngun looked like Irene at first glance, but her eyebrows were also blonde, and she stepped alongside Mr. Braggins as though by accident. He turned, however, to another man on his left and gave Melinda his back. Billie Jo changed her mind, sat down, and started eating. OOC: Vote for Kyraine (Tanuchan).

Tzimfemme, some distance outside the thread, throws her back into cranking a giant mechanism. Beside her, a broad stone circle set onto the ground turns counter-clockwise, aligning with the thread. She stops cranking and hops onto the circle, plaited rope coiled over one shoulder; the double-sigma longbow mounted on the stone rears up well out of her reach. The naked mage unwinds the rope and twirls one end, throws the loop up and over the upper horn of the longbow, then hauls the other end down to the stone and hooks it around the lower horn. A mini-portal pops open at shoulder height and produces a oversized arrow, over a meter long with a scroll coiled around itself, which Tzimfemme takes and aims with care, six marks above the horizon. The arrow smashes into the thread: If you had to resurrect this thread of all threads, you could've looked up the posts of the person who let it die a year and a half ago.

Billie Jo wheeled the cart out of the orchard aisles, then pushed it through to the kitchen, but yesterday's cart didn't emerge. She knocked on the door and waited, but got no response. When Billie Jo opened the door and walked through, she saw only Cook, chopping so swiftly the knife was blurred, sending up a shower of watermelon juice. She looked at the dents in the cutting board as she approached the opposite side. Cook proffered a knife with her other hand, handle first. "Cook!" Cook didn't look up. "Chop something, anything. We're having a buffet today with all those people dropping in and out of here, and have I got my kitchen helpers here? No, they're off gawking somewhere." She swished the knife across the board and the cubes of watermelon flew into a large bowl. Billie Jo took the knife and an apple from the cart, then slowly peeled strips of skin off of it. Cook grabbed another and shucked its skin off, then snatched the apple out of the other woman's hand and thrust the peeled one at her. "I thought the younguns were getting impatient, the way younguns do," Billie Jo began, chopping the apple. "But I heard two more were dead. Barely have any left, soon." "I certainly don't have any left in here," Cook muttered, flicking apple chunks into the bowl and grabbing a pear from the cart. "Someone strangled the only one I could rely on to not go gallivanting off. I locked up all the knives and took the key home with me, and told them all to not even think about taking any home, self-defense shmelf-defense, and what happens?" She gouged new lines into the cutting board, dicing the apple into microscopic chunks. After depositing the cut apple into the bowl, Billie Jo laid down the knife and went back into the gardens. Nobody had been knifed.

A complete degree will be worth a lot more than a partial one, especially to stitch together your checkered past.

www.thereincarnation.com -- The AM clone. Some retreads there. www.thefivepillars.org -- The evolved game. Some retreads there. #aod is keyed, #thepen has Pen people, other channels I sat in are idle, dead, or both. Wren tends to log off around 5am your time, don't know when she logs on. Nimue has hopped onto #thepen but rarely, and not always as Nimue.

Irwin glanced down at the map of the wheatfield, then at the meter mark in the concrete barrier and the sprinkler head screwed into the mark. "This one's gotta move," he nodded, and Billie Jo shut off the water valve before unscrewing the sprinkler head and tossing it into the cart. They walked down the aisle, Irwin counting each meter mark and comparing it to the water overlay on the map. "So," he said, shouting a bit over the echoing clack-clack of the cart's wheels, "you heard about Lenny?" "Did he break his gramophone?" "Nope." "Did someone else break his gramophone?" "Nope." Irwin stopped by another mark, and Billie Jo reached into the cart for a larger sprinkler head. "Murdered." She froze with her hand outstretched, then turned back to look at him. Irwin, uncharacteristically, kept talking. "Murderer wrote 'Open the Door' on the wall." "Now that makes no sense," she retorted, turning back to the concrete barrier and screwing in the new sprinkler head. "Last murder I heard about was when someone bashed in Deacon's head for messing with his daughter." "Your dad." Billie Jo snorted. Pa had stayed by the body, hammer in hand, while Jessie Ann's husband escaped. Ma was dead by then, he didn't want to keep on living. "I don't see why they had to kill Pa. Lenny shouldn't've been killed either. He didn't have any keys to Outside." She twisted the water valve roughly. "Stupid's what it is."

Tzimfemme is the reader of the quincunx (details of the lab library forthcoming in a Piazza entry) and would be interested in a book.

Billie Jo untied plastic bootees from around her feet and stepped out of them onto the concrete floor. Soil fell off of the bootees and back into the seedbed as Billie Jo folded them up and returned them to a coverall pocket. She pushed the loaded vegetable cart along the truck garden's rows, between knee-high concrete baffles holding the soil in its place, and slid it through the kitchen doors. One of Cook's helpers pushed out yesterday's cart, filled with kitchen scraps. Billie Jo dragged that behind her to the compost bin; she double-checked the bin locks to make sure no younguns had been fighting with rotten vegetables again. After washing her hands in the soil-reclamation sinks, she picked up her lunchbox and ducked into the concealing orchard rows, but came out again on the other side, checking both ways before leaving the greenhouses. Outside of her room, a young bottle-blonde had her nose to the vent. Billie Jo coughed noisily, and the woman spun around like she'd been slapped. "Hi! Um. I'm--" "Don't say anything! Then I can't tell it. What'd you bring?" "One hundred fifty credits--in hand." "Throw in a pack of cigarettes and you can have two." "Cigarettes? Eww!" "Don't lie. Look at your fingers--use a holder." Bottle-blonde glanced at her fingertips, grimaced, and flicked the cigarettes and wadded papers at Billie Jo. She went inside and came out with a slender bundle wrapped in the plastic bootees; Bottle-blonde took the bundle. "I'm telling you anyway. I'm Irene and I'm old enough to smoke!" she blurted, and ran off with the roses. Billie Jo looked to the ceiling for patience, then tapped on a door further down the hall with an "Out of Order" sign tacked onto it. John cracked it open immediately. "What do you think?" she whispered, handing two through the crack; he brought them back out, lit, and gave one back to her. "Mmm. . .I saw her lurking around Mister Braggins' suite a few days ago. I think she's trying to get to know our famous author, and you know he never said no to a pretty face. In bed," he added. Billie Jo scowled. "Right, you never had a fortune cookie. . .She's old enough to smoke but she's not old enough to say no, know what I mean?" John shut the door. Billie Jo puffed in silence for awhile before the door cracked open again, this time with a whiff of stagnant water. "Would you mind? Chuck wants one too," he added. Her forehead creased slightly but she passed another cigarette through the door.

After he leaves, Alfred turns around and flings the empty vial at Wyvern's door, which dodges by opening swiftly. Wyvern's head comes up, the can flies in, and Wyvern goes down again for good. The deflected can shoots straight up in the air, punctured by one of the almost-dragon's horns, then twirls around on the descent so everyone in the office can read the logo: Almost Perri-Air.

Less than one-thousandth of a percent remain--swift, ethical, and well within the alloted margin of error. Are you certain, Seraphim? The second voice chimed in higher registers, with higher considerations. All of the statistics are certain, and the decree on Population Control chose disease as the most ethical cure. The first voice paused. They had been overturning our own preventative measures, Dominion. Money was failing; they had reverted to bearing children for storing wealth-- I am woeful that we chose genocide, Seraphim. --Dominion! Its chimes changed key, sounded like hot iron being hammered. You must see what they had done to their planet, and to themselves! See that the disease was preventative of much more woe! The second flying object forced crystal outcroppings to grow on the edges of its disc. Air dragged around the new ailerons and pushed its orbit closer to earth. It tilted to inspect a burnt ruin in the middle of many similar structures, then shuddered at the bolt of rage from a survivor and its animal. Peace, it sang, and the boy collapsed without his rage to sustain him. We must disguise ourselves if we are to investigate further. Seraphim, you have studied this race. How do they visually signify individuals with our abilities? There is great variation, Dominion. They use light, or animal features, or multiple features of their own. . . The first flying object coasted through the air while giving all its energy to rearranging its crystals. Sunlight refracted through the new formations and flashed onto the ground in spots of color. The beams intersected and built up a hologram of a naked, sexless human with a third eye, four huge feathery wings, and light shining out from its breast. The first flying object altered the density of a few crystals, moving the hologram's wings, and mimicking hovering. Can this interact with them, Seraphim? I do not know. We must experiment.

Billie Jo Pike was Myrtle's second daughter. Myrtle's husband, Red, was pretty sure she wasn't his daughter, but what could he do? His wife had broken a bottle over the city boy's head and gotten raped for it--city boy's family hushed that up and would hush up anything worse. All Red could do, and did, was quash any hint of hoity-toity behavior in his girls, and teach them both to say no with their fists. Jessie Ann (fifty-one, now) married and started a family, and damned if it didn't happen again--rich people got bored with nothing to spend their money on and no other way to be better than other people. Billie Jo (forty-eight) was a little smarter, and didn't marry or have kids, even though it cost her most of her income. She labored in the greenhouses, from planting to harvesting, and smuggled potting soil home for her mother's cherished rosebushes. Flowers were 'wasteful' and never approved for planting in the vault greenhouses; Billie Jo sold roses for very special occasions, earning enough to continue living alone, although Ma and Pa had died.